Engaging the Question of Palestine in Philip Roth's The Counterlife

Abstract

The paper argues that in Philip Roth’s novel, The Counterlife (1988), which engages the question of Palestine, the author’s attempt to introduce a balanced view of the Arab-Israeli conflict is undermined by a narrative strategy that favors the victor and deprives the victim from entering the text except as a non-person or a decadent oriental. An application of what Edward Said calls “contrapuntal reading” to Roth’s text reveals that the author’s tendency to offer a neutral presentation of the Middle East issue is thwarted by a hegemonic master narrative - originated in Orientalism and Western imperialism - that either removes the Palestinian subaltern out of the fictional text or conflates him with a status of cultural inferiority and barbarism by assigning him a role which conforms to his image in the colonial taxonomy of inferior races..